This guy breaks down just how bad the layout of the new PHB is. The cross referencing is non-existent and the subsections seem to go in the order someone thought of them. I’m sadly unsurprised that they’ve not improved on any of these problems which existed in the original 5e PHB.
On one hand: I know damn well that formatting is a huge bitch, because I’ve made my own huge homebrew for the game.
On the other hand: This is a multi-million dollar company that’s been around for bloody ages. Hiring a professional formatter shouldn’t even be a blip in the budget.
In the 5e books, at least, the problem is not just formatting.
The structural organization of the books is an abysmal mess. Rules that must be understood together in order to resolve common situations are often spread apart and buried in subsections of several different chapters, when they could just as easily be grouped in one place, or (at the very least) have direct references to each other. Also, ambiguous prose is often used to describe mechanics that would be better represented with keywords.
They’re aesthetically nice, but as rule books, they needlessly burden the DM (and to a lesser extent the players), which takes time and attention away from actually playing the game.